Marianne Moore Quotes

Marianne Moore shares a clever, nature-infused poetic view that feels like a quiet puzzle of symbols.

38 quotes

1. War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

2. O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven - of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!

3. A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

4. You are not male nor female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man.

5. that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.

6. I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.

7. The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

8. This is a strange fraternity - these sea lions and land lions, land unicorns and sea unicorns; the lion civilly rampant, tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador - the lion standing up against this screen of woven air which is the forest: the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity.

9. So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ...

10. He's not out seeing a sight but the rock crystal thing to see - the startling El Greco brimming with inner light - that covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know as the hero.

11. What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe.

12. Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time.

13. Some speak of things we know, as new; And you, of things unknown as things forgot.

14. We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave.

15. What of it? We call them brave perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come when no one will fight for anything and there's nothing of worth to save.

16. Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister.

17. A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.

18. Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal - the symbol of medicine.

19. The problems is mastered - insupportably tiring when it was impending. Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom. The Gordian knot need not be cut.

20. Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn, One can but say, 'Farewell, good sense.'

21. We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

22. When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.

23. One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.

24. Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.

25. When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

26. The hands are the heart's messengers.

27. I believe verbal felicity is the fruit of ardor, of diligence, and of refusing to be false.

28. Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

29. Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.

30. Revision is its own reward.

31. In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

32. All are / naked, none is safe.

33. It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.

34. repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

35. As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.

36. The cynics in life are the people who are always trying to do things for people who don't want things done for them.

37. If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.

38. The enslaver is enslaved, the hater, harmed.